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Media World
25 October 2009 By Catherine O'Mahony
The managing director of the Irish Times, Maeve Donovan, said recently that she believed mobile phone applications would be a key investment for newspapers in the future.
She also said that the popularity of devices such as the iPhone meant it was likely that there would be an Irish Times application in the future.
This is not hard to see, as the Irish Times takes its online applications very seriously and has been providing a breaking news service on mobile phones for several years.
What’s more surprising is that a small regional newspaper, the Munster Express, already has a mobile phone application, scoring a first for Irish print media.
The application had a soft launch almost a year ago. It’s an experimental product that was developed by a division of the Waterford Institute of Technology.
It is now getting around 400 downloads a month, according to the paper’s managing director, Kieran Walsh.
The number is small but when, you consider that the paper sells about 9,000 copies a week, it’s about 4 per cent of sales.
Walsh said the small scale of the project meant he was not marketing it yet, but he hoped it might find a sponsor over time.
Walsh said the application was getting usage overseas, with France and the US the next biggest markets for usage after Ireland.
‘‘It’s achievable in any case, we know that," he said.
It’s odd to imagine there’s possibly a person walking around New York right now checking out the local Waterford news from the Munster Express on an iPhone.
He said there had been some technical glitches at first, but these had been worked through.
Certainly, when we tested it, it worked fine.
The programme was developed between the Munster Express and Waterford Institute of Technology’s Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG), which spent seven weeks working on the application, largely as a test case for its mobile technologies.
It has since been approved by Apple’s Application Store, which subjected it to quality testing, user interface development guidelines and appropriate age suitability ratings.
TSSG is currently working on four further media iPhone applications.
At the time of going to press, the Irish Independent looked set to launch a mobile application. In Britain, the Independent and the Times have. The Financial Times launched an application earlier this year that offers partly free and partly paid for content. Hundreds more papers worldwide have applications.
The tiresome issue for papers – and it’s the same one that crops up whenever papers veer away from printed publication – is how anyone is going to make applications pay.
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